Asymmetries between interpretation and production in Catalan pronouns

Abstract

The literature on Romance null-subject languages has often postulated a division of labor between Null and Overt pronouns: Nulls prefer to retrieve an antecedent in subject position, whereas Overts prefer an antecedent in a lower syntactic position (Carminati, 2002). However, recent research on English pronouns (Rohde and Kehler, 2014) has shown grammatical function alone cannot explain pronoun interpretation. According to this model, pronoun interpretation and production are sensitive to different sets of factors and, instead of being mirror images of each other, are related probabilistically in a Bayesian fashion. This paper tests this model with Catalan data from two discourse-completion experiments to study the structural, grammatical factors and the semanticopragmatic factors that affect the interpretation and production of Null and Overt pronouns. Our main result is that both Null and Overt pronouns present asymmetries regarding their interpretation and production: (1) the production of Null pronouns is affected mainly by grammatical factors (they are more likely to be used to refer to subjects), but their interpretation is also influenced by semantico-pragmatic factors (rhetorical relations and the verb's lexical semantics), and (2) while Overt pronouns have a strong interpretation bias towards the object, they are not the preferred form to refer to the object.